Views from the Store

Matthew’s Blog – Office 365 Migration

This week we were focusing on data normalisation and preparing for an Office 365 migration, which is essentially taking their existing email system and putting it into the cloud. Oh yeah, Airan has got a PC to work on too however certain parts of the taskbar are frozen so we also had the task of troubleshooting this.

So, the data normalisation, we were working on the Apprentice Store database. I was still struggling with the whole concept of normalisation so a lot of time was spent simply just practising this. I did try to implement what I had learned into Access and I was semi-successful.

On to the main bulk of this week, Office 365. The first task I was set with doing was resetting users’ passwords and inputting that data into a spreadsheet. It was repetitive work and it ended up taking me almost 2 hours, it may sound boring but I found that I actually quite enjoyed it.

The next task was recreating a Public Folder Structure in Outlook. I worked with Airan, reading out names of folders, permissions etc. from their existing mail server while he created them in Office 365. We could’ve created or found a PowerShell script to do this but felt that, because our knowledge was so little, we would’ve been faster simply doing it manually and, if nothing else, it was a good teamworking exercise. It was cool to have another thing to work on with Airan. Soon we got into a system and we were on the last folder before we knew it.

After trying many and various solutions, Airan’s taskbar still wasn’t working and it was looking like we would have to reset Windows, until this morning. Microsoft rolled out an update, I’m not sure if it was intended to fix the issue, but it works!

The next task was to do a little spring cleaning, our client had gone through many email systems which left some users with many addresses, although this wouldn’t be an issue I decided to get rid of all addresses that weren’t SMTP. Our last task of the week was creating user guides about setting up their new Office 365 email on various devices. It did take me longer than I thought it would but now I have done it, I shouldn’t really need to do it again and, if I ever did, I’d be a lot more proficient.

That’s it for this week, as per usual I feel like a lot of work was done and a lot was learned, next week I’ll be working from home, hopefully I can keep up this trend.